Posts by Steve

This was the beginning of “Phase 3” of the Microship project. This was kind of insane, but an amazing opportunity presented itself and I couldn’t resist. We luck into a great deal on a piece of multihull history, a folding 30-footer that predates the Corsair F-31 (though it’s a bare hull). We zoom to Seattle…

OK, let’s lay it out analytically. Cat versus tri? Tri looks most sensible for lots of reasons, and we target the 30-foot range at $15K. Build versus buy? We don’t want to be boatbuilders. Hoping to conjure something with a clear enough spec, we lay out a full set of requirements… The cartoon above, based…

Hmmm, so do we build a catamaran? Armed with study plans, we consider this…. while the video turret starts to work, a simple subset of pressure control seems within range, the manpacks practically dance under the tutelage of their team, and we proceed with general hackage. But what to float it all? The delightful image…

In all my years of system engineering and designing strange contraptions, I have never encountered such a plethora of trade-offs as I am finding in the selection of a boat. Weight, internal space, seaworthiness, appearance, solar surface, comfort, trailerability, hackability, speed… all these and more conflict in ways that make the old gain-bandwidth and freedom-security…

I just spent the weekend making a brief airborne jaunt to San Antonio, Texas to visit Charlie Mayer and go sailing on Canyon Lake aboard his Stiletto 27. This issue of the Microship Status Report is devoted to my first observations about the boat, thoughts on a few bizarre but essential mechanical hacks, and the…

Hello from the Microship lab! As always, the feeling I have when immersed in many simultaneous projects is a frustrating one of making incremental progress in many directions — advances which, although adding up to equivalent net progress in one direction (minus context-switching overhead), subjectively appear as mere dabbling. A sketch here, a phone call…

As I mentioned in the previous issue, one of the hot projects currently afoot is a pair of manpacks (though as Jean Polly pointed out in response, now that Faun is part of this project they might better be called personpacks…). Anyway, it’s proving to be a fascinating and challenging part of the system, so…

You haven’t seen one of these reports for a while, have you? (Some of you — the new UCSD Microship engineering team — have NEVER seen one.) Well, between June ’93 and April ’94, I put out over half a megabyte of these project updates. Somewhere last spring, I got out of the habit of…